Sure, we'd like wider sidewalks. (Or, you know, sidewalks.) Curb extensions might be nice. So would a head start at intersections and more time to cross the street. We wouldn't mind looking at something besides parking lots, either.

But we're tough. We make do with what we've got.

So when I learned that Upper Kirby had installed a new traffic light to "increase walkability," as a PR person wrote in an email, I was giddy. Think of the couples strolling, hand in hand, in the evenings! Think of the lunchtime workers! Here, at last, 20 safe seconds to get across a high-speed, six-lane arterial without having to trudge all the way up and down the city's long, hot blocks!

THE NEW light is located on Kirby at West Main, next to the mixed-use Kirby Collection. (It's that blue glass box with the 25-story elliptical tower where the funeral home used to be.) Jack Bousquet, a developer with Thor Equities, told me the light was the first thing he wanted to do when he looked at the site.

"The city didn't want it," he says — even though he made it clear from the beginning that Thor Equities would pay for it.

Why not? The city wasn't convinced it was necessary. Lights, after all, are designed for cars, not pedestrians. And cars didn't need another one on Kirby.

The city isn't alone in its cars-before-people approach to streets. Consider Texas' state standards, which are delineated in the Texas Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices: "A traffic control signal should not be installed if it will seriously disrupt progressive traffic flow," it states.

Jeffrey Weatherford, the city's director of transportation and drainage operations, says that these lights are "very, very hard to get," explaining that developers have to show that projects meet nine "warrants" that have to do, primarily, with the number of cars that come and go.

But Bousquet stood firm, and after 14 months of battling the city, he got his light. It was activated in late April.

"It's already starting to get used quite a bit," says Travis Younkin, the executive director of the Upper Kirby Management District.

IN SOME ways, Houston changes furiously, relentlessly — and those ways are hard to miss on Kirby. One-story buildings disappear overnight, replaced by high-rises. Developments like the Kirby Collection keep sprouting up. Every month the view through your windshield seems different, taller, denser.

But Kirby itself stays the same: a crowded north-south arterial where traffic zooms past at pedestrian-endangering speeds. Younkin says the city hasn't built new roads inside Loop 610 in "50 or 60 years." The network that Upper Kirby has now is the same it had when it was a suburb, when far fewer people lived, worked and drove there.

As Younkin points out, "a road built in 1955" doesn't cut it these days. Kirby has to become a city street, not a suburban one — a street that accommodates pedestrians as well as it accommodates cars.

So count this new light as a win. Like the bike lane on Lamar Street downtown or the pedestrian improvements on Bagby Street, the light is actual, honest-to-concrete infrastructure that changes the bones of the city. And, Weatherford says, "It will make it easier for people to cross the street."

Allyn West edits and writes for Gray Matters. Before joining the Houston Chronicle, he worked as a writer for the Rice Design Alliance and Swamplot. He graduated from the University of Houston in 2015 with a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing.